Demonstration of a high-temperature fiber-optic gas sensor made with a sol-gel process to incorporate a fluorescent indicator.

To make a gas sensor suitable for use at high temperatures, we have used a sol-gel-processing technique to bond a copper-exchanged zeolite fluorescence indicator onto the end of an all-silica optical fiber. Experimental results from single-fiber prototype sensors show they can be used to measure either the oxygen concentration or the equivalence ratio for gas mixtures containing weak or strong reductants, respectively.